The Worst Pixar Movies, According to the Internet
We like to take pot shots at the "Cars" movies, but are they really so lowly rated?
Last month, many indulged me as I polled them on which Pixar movies they considered the best and why. My badgering led to a ranking of the best Pixar movies according to the people around me. In this ranking, “Toy Story” has the most votes by a far margin. Other movies that made the top 5 are“Ratatouille,” “Monsters, Inc.”, “Coco,” and “Inside Out,” which ties with “Finding Nemo” for fifth place. Other films that received not as many votes but still wound up in the top 10 are, in order: “The Incredibles,” “WALL-E,” “A Bug’s Life,” and “Up.”
Every poll comes with its little surprises. I had predicted “Toy Story,” the one that began it all, would do well, but not that well. I thought “Inside Out” would get more votes because when you love something an inordinate amount, you expect everyone else to get with the program and be on the same page. There are some movies that I find to be synonymous with the Pixar brand, such as “Up,” and I didn’t anticipate it not making the top 5.
Another unexpected but delightful part of polling was the unsolicited opinions I got from friends about the Pixar movies they disliked. I didn’t ask people what they thought were the subpar Pixar movies, but several were happy to volunteer the information. A friend told me “The Good Dinosaur” was the worst movie she’s ever seen. Another friend hates “Brave.” Her toddler also has strong opinions: she loves “Coco” and “Toy Story” but could only sit through five minutes of “Cars” before asking for it to be turned off.
If movies like “Ratatouille” and “Coco” are considered the pinnacles of Pixar artistry, is there a consensus around what people consider the low points? The sampling of my poll is small—just a little over 60 people—so it’s hard to say which Pixar movies are the least beloved because while a movie receiving no votes might say something about people’s perception of it, there are 11 Pixar movies in my poll that didn’t get any votes.
So I decided to open this wide. Since I wrote my last article, NPR, the inspiration behind my original poll, has released a list of what its listeners consider the best Pixar movies. Movie rating platforms like IMDb also show which Pixar movies have received the highest and lowest scores, based on ratings from hundreds of thousands to millions of users. If we were to look at all these different rankings combined, my thinking is it would shed light on what people (or at least some parts of the internet) think are the worst Pixar movies.
To do this, I looked at NPR’s list and the ratings every Pixar movie (except for “Elio,” which was recently released) received on IMDb, Letterboxd, and Rotten Tomatoes. The ranking from IMDb, Letterboxd, and Rotten Tomatoes, I determined by score. If a movie gets the highest score on the platform, I rank it as number one, the second-highest gets ranked second, and so on and so forth. Rotten Tomatoes has both the critics’ score and the audience’s score, so I took both into account as separate rankings. I then put all the rankings into a spreadsheet to see how a movie places across these platforms, including which movies continuously land at the very bottom. To minimize the influence of any outliers, I looked at the median ranking of the movies, rather than the average. Which brings me to the worst-ranking movies that are of a league of their own.
The 4 Worst Pixar Movies
“Lightyear” is supposedly Andy’s favorite movie in the “Toy Story” universe and the reason why he bought the Buzz Lightyear action figure. It’s good Andy cherishes the film because no one else seems to. It’s the only movie to receive zero votes from people in NPR’s poll. And on Letterboxd and IMDb, it’s the lowest-scoring Pixar movie. (There’s a significant percentage of IMDb reviews that give it 1 star out of 10.) Boring seems to be the movie’s main offense, based on the reviews. Some viewers also felt a disconnect between the movie’s main character, portrayed by Chris Evans, and the Lightyear portrayed by Tim Allen in the “Toy Story” movies. And while you can argue that the “Cars” movies, which I’ll mention shortly, are at least loved exclusively by preschool boys, “Lightyear” seems to be a movie loved by neither kids nor adults.
And then we have the “Cars” franchise. In second place for worst Pixar movie is “Cars 2.” Here’s what my friend Cameron, who has defended many of Pixar’s lesser entries, has to say about the movie: “I don’t think there’s any Pixar movie I haven’t gotten even a little bit emotional about. Except for ‘Cars 2.’”
“Cars 2” has the dubious honor of being the lowest-scoring Pixar movie on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and the audience. Looking back on the reviews, the consensus seems to be that the movie isn’t horrible, it’s just mediocre by comparison. People also take issue with its plot, which they found to be overstuffed and convoluted. It probably doesn’t help that “Cars 2,” released in 2011, followed after 2010’s “Toy Story 3,” the most acclaimed among Pixar’s sequels.
Following “Cars 2” is “Cars 3.” It’s not the rock bottom on any list, but it still catches a lot of heat. Most critics seem to agree that “Cars 3” is a competent course correction from its predecessor, but that it still lacks the emotional punch that Pixar movies are capable of at their best.
And, finally, in the bottom fourth is “A Good Dinosaur.” Similar to the “Cars” movies, “A Good Dinosaur” seems to suffer from a case of “not good enough.” Some viewers say it’s soporific for adults with its lightweight story, but more palatable for young children. It’s visually stunning, but prettiness can only get you so far. While it’s not as derided as “Lightyear” or “Cars 2,” it’s probably little consolation to have multiple reviews of the movie say, “It’s not the best, but it’s not the worst.”
Best Pixar Movies, According to the Internet (And How It Differs from My Poll)
Every ranking comes with its quirks. When I was polling the people around me on the best Pixar movies, I wondered how it might skew differently from general popular opinion. My sample size, for one, is small. Its demographic is also mainly millennial, and because I’m surveying my friends and coworkers, it’s not exactly a nationally representative sample. Would that lead to certain movies over-indexing? Does everyone love “Ratatouille,” a movie I’ve long thought of as popular with artists and other people who work in creative industries, as much as my friends do? I was curious if I were to study the median of Pixar movie rankings on IMDb, Letterboxd, Rotten Tomatoes, and NPR’s poll, and compare it with my poll, how differently the two would compare when it comes to the top 10 movies.
Turns out it’s a lot of the same players, but in different positions. From first to tenth place, the best Pixar movies, according to the internet, are “WALL-E,” “Coco,” “Toy Story,” “Up,” “Finding Nemo,” “Toy Story 3” and “Monsters, Inc.” (tying for sixth), “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles” (tying for eighth), and “Inside Out.”
One of the most apparent differences between this ranking and my poll is how much higher “WALL-E” and “Up” are. Here, they place first and fourth, respectively, rather than eighth and tenth in my poll. “WALL-E” is hailed by reviews as a masterpiece, a perfect marriage of spectacle and heart. Having only seen this movie recently for the first time, I can confirm that the first half hour is magical. The abandoned world on Earth is not something I’ve ever really seen in a children’s film before. And WALL-E’s sojourns throughout it play out like a beautiful silent film where you convey so much without saying a single word. The artistic peaks in the first half hour are so high that I understand why people love this movie even when it’s saddled with a larger plotline that doesn’t quite match up.
I feel similarly about “Up.” It has maybe one of the most memorable Pixar sequences ever with that 5-minute montage scene of Ellie and Carl’s married life. Is the rest of the movie that great? Eh, not necessarily. As one of the reviews I read points out, the movie’s poignant moments sometimes don’t really square with its more kiddie elements, such as its cartoonish villain and his pack of talking dogs. Still, you can’t deny the movie’s charm. When Carl’s house lifts up into the sky, it’s hard not to feel your own heart soar a little as well.
Another noticeable difference between my top 10 and the internet’s top 10 is that “Toy Story 3” is in and “A Bug’s Life” is out. Turns out if my group of friends is over-indexing for anything, it’s bug kids. “A Bug’s Life” doesn’t crack the top 10 on any of my sources. The closest it comes to is NPR’s listeners’ poll, which has it as No.13. I’m happy though that “Toy Story 3,” my favorite entry of the franchise, cracked the top 10 list. (It’s the only sequel to do so.)
To come up with the final top 10, I played around with different methods for computing the data, including looking at the median and the average ranking of movies across platforms. I also considered a system where movies that appeared in the top 10 of any list would receive points. If you placed first, you would get 10 points, if you were second, you got 9 points, all the way to tenth place, where you would receive 1 point.
Depending on the method, the top 10 would look different, but by a marginal degree. If I did average ranking, rather than median ranking, for instance, “Toy Story 2” would squeeze out “The Incredibles” because while the former hovers just outside of the top 10th spot on most lists, it’s ranked No.1 for the critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, giving the movie an edge in its average ranking. There’s no perfect way to interpret the data. Each method comes with its advantages and pitfalls. But eventually, I settled on using the median because doing so allowed me to reduce the impact of outliers.
Regardless of which one of the three methods I take, the top 5—“WALL-E,” “Coco,” “Toy Story,” “Up,” and “Finding Nemo”—remain the top 5, though their positions might switch. “WALL-E” is No.1 if I use the median method, like I’ve opted to here, but if I do averages or the points system, “Coco” ends up on top. Funnily, though, “Finding Nemo” is a No.5 movie, no matter how I slice the data. It’s an unpolarizing, agreeable runner-up movie. People recognize it’s great, just maybe not the greatest.
Finally, while it’s easy to say that Pixar peaked too soon and its earlier movies are its best movies, that might not be entirely the case. Yes, most of the rankings still largely favor movies from Pixar from before 2010, but “Inside Out” (2015) and “Coco” (2017) buck the trend. And while “Soul” didn’t make it into the top 10 when I calculated the median ranking, it comes close at No.12. On Rotten Tomatoes, audience members, unlike critics, also have been much kinder to more recent releases. Movies like “Onward,” “Toy Story 4,” “Elemental,” and “Inside Out 2” are rated as some of the highest-scoring movies by the general audience. I don’t love “Toy Story 4” and “Inside Out 2” as much as the original movies that inspired them—sorry, correction, I hated “Toy Story 4”—but that doesn’t mean everyone else feels the same.
We would over-represent on bug kids in our group 😂 very on brand
I am only friends with artists or bug kids, there is no other genre